Making Maths: Stars

Stage: 2 Challenge Level:

Have a go at drawing these stars and experiment with colouring them in different ways. The trick to making them really look good is to use a sharp pencil and draw VERY light lines until you're ready to draw in the final lines to finish the star.

There are two examples given below. Both start with the same six points around a circle, but the lines you draw in are different. Try designing some stars of your own.

You will need:

a pair of compasses
sharp pencil
ruler
paper

What to do:

1. Start by drawing a circle. It can be any size, but a good size for your first try is about a $5$cm radius.

2. Keep the compass set on the radius ($5$cm) and mark off that length all around the circle. This marks the six points of the star.

3. Now start drawing (very lightly) lines you need to make the basic star shape.

4. Carefully trace (more darkly) over the parts of the lines needed to finish the star.

A star like this one is found on the flag of Israel. Perhaps you can create it too?

Or you could try this more complex star:

This activity features in our December 2008 Advent Calendar.